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Pacifier · 05-21-2005, 02:28 AM

Quote:

The US against the UN
Craig Morris 21.05.2005

The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations finds that the US
is the main perpetrator in the scandal surrounding the oil-for-food
program

Since the end of 2004, the press in the US has been in a frenzy. In the
UN's oil-for-food program, oil is said to have been sold illegally via
companies from countries such as Russia, France, and even Germany. Kofi
Annan's son is said to have played a major role in this smuggling
operation, and -- what else does one expect -- funds are said to have
flown back to dictator Saddam Hussein. A scandal! At least, that's what
the press in the US would have us believe. But the real scandal is a
different one: how come a large-scale smuggling operation that has been
known for years is suddenly making headlines in the US?

In Europe, the press has reported about the scandal, but generally as a
domestic policy issue in the US. After all, in Europe the media have
been reporting about this illicit activity for some time now -- for
instance, in the French documentary Irak, barils de pétrole, barils de
poudre (1) from 2003.

Le programme "pétrole contre nourriture", sous le contrôle étroit des
Nations unies, assure - tout juste - la survie des habitants. En
revanche, la contrebande de pétrole enrichit le régime irakien, les
États voisins et les négociants

The film shows how the US, which monitors anything that moves in Iraq,
cannot but have known about the constant convoy of trucks carrying oil
from Iraq to neighboring states friendly to the US, such as Turkey and
Jordan.

But the media in Europe did not start reporting about this illicit
trade in 2003. As early as 1999, the BBC reported (2) that the
Americans and the British, who controlled everything in Iraq, were
allowing oil to be smuggled out of the country:

As many as 700 trucks come this way every day bound for Turkey,
almost all of them are carrying fuel, most of it diesel. Under the
terms of the UN's oil-for-food programme, this is sanctions-busting.
It's hardly a secret. Some of the tankers carry several thousand litres
of cheap fuel into Turkey at a time. It is obvious to anyone standing
at the side of the road what is going on.... Smuggling between Iraq
and Turkey is increasingly sophisticated. The Kurds act as the
middlemen. No-one seems to mind

Anyone witnessing the recent hounding of the UN in the press in the US
since December of 2004 must have been wondering why everyone was
getting so upset all of a sudden. And above all, why were the Americans
acting like everyone else had been involved, but not themselves?

Monday night, the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations
reported its findings from its investigation of possible US involvement
in the scandal. The Subcommittee found that the US is responsible for
some 52% of the overall volume of oil sold illicitly. According to an
article (3) in the British daily The Guardian, the Senate's report
concludes that the US not only knew about such transactions, but
expressly approved of them, as did the rest of the UN Security Council:

On occasion, the United States actually facilitated the illicit oil
sales
From the Senate's report

Among other things, documents were found that prove that the US
shipping firm Odin Marine Inc. shipped crude out of the port in Khor
al-Amaya with the approval of the US, although this port was officially
closed under the oil-for-food program. Specifically, the documents
reveal that the company got the go-ahead from the US military, which
assured the company that they would not intervene if the shipments were
made.

The real scandal

It's bad enough that such an international body as the UN can stoop so
low. Apparently, some of the UN staff must have said to themselves,
"The US is throwing a smuggling party, and everyone's gonna be there!"
What else could be expected of a secretary-general who was practically
appointed by the US after the Clinton administration had basically
thrown Annan's predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, out of office. The
US vetoed (4) the reelection of the popular Egyptian, who spoke French
as well as he did English, against the will of the rest of the world.
Boutros-Ghali wanted to step up humanitarian aid, and he criticized the
West for doing too little in Rwanda when the genocide could have been
stopped. In other words, he was a pain in the US's neck.

Kofi Annan seemed more likely to become a sycophant to the US. But in
the end, not even he could approve of every foreign-policy decision the
US made; even he criticized the preemptive strike against Iraq. So he
got what was coming to him at the end of 2004.

The whole scandal was set off when the neo-conservative New York Sun
(5) made payments worth $150,000 to Kofi Annan's son public. Among
other people, influential neo-conservative Richard Perle is a business
partner of Conrad Black, who owns the Sun.

But the sudden agitation in the US press since the end of 2004 gives us
great cause for alarm, for it demonstrates that the press in the US is
unable to do two basic things: 1) investigate on their own, instead of
waiting for some governmental spokesperson to tell them what scandal
they should be writing about; and 2) keep an eye on reports from
outside the US, especially the ones that are already in English and
therefore don't even have to be translated.

What's worse, the Bush administration must have assumed that the
central role that the US played in this "scandal" was going to come to
light sooner or later. In other words, Americans were intentionally
misled by people full well knowing that their own complicity would soon
be revealed.

Flagrant nonchalance

Once again, the Bush administration does not seem to mind being shown
to be hypocritical. Back when the Bush administration claimed that Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction, they must have assumed that the truth
would soon be known. But they seem to rest assured that it does not
matter whether their own credibility is called into question -- it
doesn't matter what the outside world thinks anyway, and Bush seems to
be able to get a majority of Americans to support him even when it is
clear that he "made a mistake."

Bush and Cheney have a long history of such astonishing nonchalance.
Back in 2001, Cheney came under fire because his company Halliburton
had been involved in lucrative business deals with Saddam Hussein via
domestic and foreign subsidiaries. Your average businessmen would have
claimed that he could not possibly know about every single business
transaction of every one of these subsidiaries in such a large
international consortium. That wouldn't take the heat off him because
it would nonetheless be a breach of due diligence, but at least
everyone would have known what the poor man was saying.

But in 2000, Cheney claimed on US television that there had never been
any such transactions, as the Washington Post reported (6) in 2001:

I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even
arrangements that were supposedly legal.... We've not done any business
in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a
standing policy that I wouldn't do that

Three weeks later, he had to take back this claim. Only then did he
claim that he simply had not known about these transactions, but he
also quickly added that Halliburton had soon afterwards sold off these
subsidiaries. The contradiction is apparent: he didn't know about these
transactions, but the subsidiaries had been sold off quickly because of
them...

The report in the Washington Post also proves that the press in the US
had been reporting about the scandal for many years, albeit only
marginally:

U.S. and European officials acknowledged that the expanded production
also increased Saddam Hussein's capacity to siphon off money for
weapons, luxury goods and palaces. Security Council diplomats estimate
that Iraq may be skimming off as much as 10 percent of the proceeds
from the oil-for-food program

No major US paper systematically investigated the crucial role that the
US was playing in the oil-for-food scandal. Thanks to this lapse, Kofi
Annan, his son, and the entire UN have now been under fire for some six
months -- at least in the US. Meanwhile, in Europe the media are not
only reporting about the scandal, but also wondering why the US is
suddenly so upset.

Where does this take us?

At the moment, it is not clear whether this report from the US Senate
will "save" Kofi Annan. But he himself is not as important as the
general attitude that the US has towards the UN. Will the report change
anything in this respect?

Perhaps, for the press in the US seems to have woken up on this issue.
On Tuesday, the Houston Chronicle published (7) a detailed report about
the history of business dealings between the Bayoil company of Houston,
which played a major role in the smuggling that took place in the past
few years, and the Iraq régime -- dealings that date back to the 1980s.

However, the "scandal" surrounding the oil-for-food program is just one
part of a much larger campaign that aims to discredit the UN entirely.
US interests are to take the foreground. In other words, even if it now
becomes clear, finally, that the US played a major role in this affair,
a lot of Americans will nevertheless be left with the impression that
the UN is corrupt.

And that is exactly what some neo-conservatives want, such as the
people behind www.moveamericaforward.org, who are proud of having
collected 100,000 signatures in a petition to "kick the UN out of the
US." The nomination of John Bolton as the US's ambassador to the UN is
another part of this campaign. After all, Bolton has mostly qualified
himself for this position by calling for an abolishment of the UN.

So while making US involvement in the scandal surrounding the
oil-for-food program clear is certainly a step forward, it is also only
a small one. There is still much work to be done. The principal
opponents of the UN within the US have not been weakened, and
journalists in the US have not become more investigative. At the
moment, one of the hottest topics in England is a memo from a meeting
between Blair and Bush in July of 2002. The memo states that "the
intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." But in the
US, this memo is somehow not a hot topic, as the Chicago Tribune
reported (8) on Tuesday.

LINKS

(1)
http://www.arte-tv.com/fr/histoire-s...265698,CmC=265
696.html
(2) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/despatches/69411.stm
(3) http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/...485648,00.html
(4) http://mondediplo.com/1996/11/un?var...+Boutros-Ghali
(5) http://www.nysun.com/
(6) http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/02.03E.Hallib.Iraq.htm
(7) http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3184968
(8)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...052may17,1,598
4426.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true

(Source http://www.telepolis.de/r4/artikel/20/20137/1.html )

the article raises a couple of good questions. Why are the Americans
acting like everyone else had been involved, but not themselves?

Is the american press and public really that numb not the see the US involement in the scandal?

If afraid that this is true, all that will be rememberes is the "Fact" that the UN is corrupt, everything else will be forgotten. But what else can you expect? The US is happy to have started a war with deliberate false inteligence informations (upps, wrong link the correct one, but the difference is marginal .... )